» A list of books - little things

A list of books - May 15th, 2008 [ « ] [ » ]

via Neil
A very American internet list of books; the top 106 books tagged “unread” in library thing

Bold what you have read, italicize books youâ€™ve started but couldnâ€™t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk to those youâ€™ve read more than once. Underline those on your To Be Read list

To take advantage of my stylesheet and highlight things all the italics and underlines are also bold but that doens’t mean I’ve read them, just that I think it looks better to do it that way. Also opinions:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Loved it.
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22 Can’t remember it much
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote I really enjoyed this but after six months on and off I was glad when it finished.
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice I think it was a condition of my marriage that I should read this
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies very nearly didn’t finish, example upon example. I got the idea pretty much entirely from the first chapter.
War and Peace in celebration of joining the Queens Park library I borrowed this out the other day, the biggest book they had.
Vanity Fair. Does the magazine count? actually I’ve only ever looked at the pictures in that.
The Time Travellerâ€™s Wife
The Iliad
Emma. I did draw a cover for it and I’ve seen Clueless about 10 times.
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver I enjoy Neal Stevenson books a lot but I have reservations. I think The Diamond Age is his best
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead I thought I’d hate it but I didn’t though in retrospect maybe I do.
Foucaultâ€™s Pendulum hard going but worth it
Middlemarch
Frankenstein. Not as good as Dracula
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula. Better than Frankenstein though after an amazing start it turns into a pretty standard adventure yarn.
A clockwork orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno. I had the penguin 60p version and it only had the first 3 circles.
The Satanic Verses
Sense and sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckooâ€™s nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the Dâ€™Urbevilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliverâ€™s Travels
Les misÃ©rables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay I lost it on the tube, Emma has a copy so I may start again, though it’s a present from an ex boyfriend so I may have to boycott it on those grounds.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. Alright i suppose, don’t really see what the fuss is about
Dune. Great! More controversially I like the film.
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angelaâ€™s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A peopleâ€™s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything. I’ve read bits of this but not from the beginning, I just looked up the bits about the NHM and natural selection.
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being. Not light.
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed the dull bits of Guns, Germs etc. but x10
Cloud Atlas Quite a long way down the to read list mind you.
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye didn’t like it much but I certainly didn’t hate it.
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance thought it was great as an earnest 15 year old, maybe it is. I don’t think I’ll read it again.
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravityâ€™s Rainbow
The Hobbit* I’ve recently renewed my love of Tolkein by reading this book. The pacing is brilliant and the language is lovely.
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

And then Charlie said:

What an extraordinary mix of books. Neil Gaiman’s almost entire ouevre (Anansi Boys, Neverwhere, American Gods - all three of which I have read, and not a single one of which is any good) in with Ulysses and Moby Dick? I bet whoever compiled the list first is a regular reader of boingboing and thinks that citizen journalism is a credible threat to the news industry. He (I reckon it’s a he) probably reads Wired as well.

Also, I reckon I love James Joyce more than anyone else in the whole world, but even I reckon it’s overkill to have Dubliners, and Portrait and Ulysses in a list of 100 books that you might have started at one point.

I too liked the Lynch film of Dune. They should have an extra mark-up for books that you haven’t read, and probably won’t bother reading because you’ve seen the film, even though you’d like to read them “one day” (for me: Dune, The Three Musketeers, Lolita, all the Austens, Jane Eyre, Frankenstein)

And the “film” of The Three Musketeers that I have seen is obviously Dogtanian and the Muskehounds, although I think I might have watched the tongue in cheek Richard Chamblerlain version.

I see what the methodology was. I apologise for ascribing a personality to an emergent phenomenon. I feel suitably chastened.

And then tom said:

Nevertheless, the personality you described is probably the arithmetic mean of LibraryThing users.

RE Neil Gaiman. I’ve not read any of his Novels but I’ve read quite a few of his comics and they never really seem to click with me, but that never seems to stop me from buying another. See also Grant Morrison.

I think the interesting thing about the list is it’s a combination of geek-lit Gaiman, Stevenson etc. and weighty capital L Literature. Half stuff that the “person” wants to believe that one day they’ll read and half stuff that they actually will read.

And then Neil said:

Agreed, a good way of summarising the list. Interesting that of all possible geek lit, it’s Stephenson and Gaiman that are as it were most unfinished, although I can see why. Even if you weren’t enjoying, say, a Pratchett book, it’s not exactly a strain to finish it!

And then Tom A said:

I want to do this list! I will as soon as I have a moment.

The Neil Gaiman novels are atrocious. Whereas the comics are fabulous, though I can see why there are those who criticise them for being self indulgent and predictable. Loving Neil Gaiman is like loving the Beatles song Here Comes The Sun.

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